Ahmed Moosa

Re: What is the best book for c#?

Have a look at Head First C# and I always suggest taking others suggestions as a starting point and then actually going to the book store with a list of possible candidates and thumbing through the books yourself. You'll get lots of suggestions and opinions,
but what might work for someone else may not work for you, so go to the book store and check the books out yourself. You may want to also check your local library and see if they have any of the books you are interested in, so that you can try before you buy.

Re: What is the best book for c#?

Are you already a programmer who wants to learn C# or are you a total novice? As you are posting on an ASP.NET site do you plan to use it to build ASP.NET web sites or is your use going to be more generic?

The best thing I can recommend you do is to go to amazon.com (the USA site as they have most customer reviews) and do a search. Sort by customer review but don't look at anything with less than 10 reviews. Read the customer reviews paying particular attention
to the critical reviews.

Re: What is the best book for c#?

C# is one of the programming languages that can be used in developing ASP.NET web sites, but a book on C# may only teach you the language fundamentals then you have ASP.NET to learn as well.

Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step published by Microsoft Press is a good beginners book for the base C# language, but won't teach you hardly anything about ASP.NET.

Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB published by Wrox is a good beginners book for teaching you the basics of developing web sites with ASP.NET, but it wont teach you much about C#

My recommendation as you are a complete beginner would be to purchase Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step to learn C# and then Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB to learn building ASP.NET web sites using web forms.

Once you have read those two volumes and worked through the examples you will have a good idea of what you
don't know and where you need to move your stuidies onto.

Re: What is the best book for c#?

Re: What is the best book for c#?

I have to be d'accord with Huske - you should definitely consider books by Stephen Walther - he is one of the best among his field and you can for sure learn something relevant and important more easily than somewhere else. Maybe you just go to a public
library and read through a couple of pages and then decide which book you might take and can handle. :)

Re: What is the best book for c#?

Web Dreamer

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I have not seen the second edition but I used Amazon's "Look Inside" feature and it appears very similar to the first edition. Tom Archer wrote the orginal without Andrew Whitechapel. I'm guessing that this is a minor revision.

The reason that "Inside C#" is such a great book is the way that Tom Archer explaiins c# ... you do not even use an IDE like Visual Studio. Tom Archer has you use a text editor like notepad and the c# command line compiler. Later, when
you're using Visual Studio you'll have a better understanding of what Visual Studio does when it's building your c# applications.

You also likely want to get the very useful free tool LINQPad. Read about it here:
http://www.linqpad.net/. LINQPad gives you the ability to try out c# statements and expressions, et cetera. Think of LINQPad as a programmer's scratch pad.

The reason to read "Inside C#" is to get started ... you'll later need to learn new features that have been introduced with later versions of c#.

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Admittedly, I was skeptical about the "Illustrated" part ... I wondered whether it was just a gimmick or perhaps a few illustrations just to justify the title. On skimming through the Google preview, I now see that it has a substantial number of diagrams
that appear to be quite useful.

Re: What is the best book for c#?

Yes I will admit that "illustrated" does seem odd, however the diagrams do help understanding. I have both books and I can recommend both books. Some people will find the illustrated book better. Others will find Adam Freeman's approach better. For a C#
programming team, I would recommend both books for their library.

There is also another C# book from Apress that I have recently reviewed "Beginning C# Object-Oriented Programming" (see http://www.apress.com/9781430235309). For someone without an object-orientated background would find that book very useful.

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Re: What is the best book for c#?

aspflower

I think Illustrated C# is an very good book, however I suggest that you endeavor to preview various books and see which C# suits you best.

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Re: What is the best book for c#?

aspflower

Thanks Tatworth for the advice. I started to read Illustrated C# 2010 last week and for me this is a great book to learn C# with good examples, good illustrated examples and easy to follow.

Thank you. There is not a single best book for a subject like this - find a book that you find easy to follow. Illustrated C# 2010 provides not just excellent instruction in words but concepts are illustrated by diagrams together with good code examples.

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Re: What is the best book for c#?

I agree that books like Head First C# are good for beginners, but after you read a book like that one, you'll need a good reference book that you'll consult on a daily basis. And when we are talking about reference books for C# then you won't find
better than C# in a Nutshell from Albahari brothers.

Here's what Scott Gu says about it: "C# 4.0 in a Nutshell is one of the few books I keep on my desk as a quick reference. It is a book I recommend."